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Hi, my name is Amanda Oakleaf. I am owner, head baker, decorator of Amanda Oakleaf Cakes in Winthrop, Massachusetts where we do custom cakes of all kinds — wedding cakes, birthday cakes, sculpted cakes. Anything you can think of we can make it into a cake. And today I will be talking to you about cake decorating.So, it’s actually a fondant-gum paste mix. And that will allow, once it’s dry it will hold its shape really well. Much better than fondant on its own. So, I have a peach color, skin color, kneaded. You just want to knead it into a nice smooth ball. So you kind of want to pinch a size off that’s going to be appropriate for the top of the cake. So that’s going to be the body. And whatever you are not using of the fondant-gum paste mix, you want to keep wrapped up in plastic so that it doesn’t dry out. And then keep a foam to hold the shape. We’ll put a little divot here with your thumb. And that will be a good spot for the head to sit. He needs some legs. Pinch off a smaller piece. To make them equal size, we’ll split it into two right down the middle before we shape the leg. So, it’s easy to always start with a ball and then flatten it out and shape it how you need it after wards. And it will be like he’s laying on his stomach. And then with your hand, just shape a little foot. To have the foot that curves around and if you can’t, you know, if your fingers are too hard, you can use one of the sculpting fondant tools to kind of create creases, and folds, and bends. And kind of pinch the side. This is what goes underneath him, and then this is what shows on the side. And then we want to do the same thing, only opposite, with the other side. Those are legs, and it needs arms. Same thing, start with the big ball and cut it in half so you have two equal pieces. And then the arms are actually going to come up and be under his head. Bend it a little, and then you’ll want to just pinch off a little part on the end for the hand. Kind of roll it between your fingers and then you can flatten it. That will be his hand, and then again, same as with the legs, we’re just going to flatten this piece so it sits flat underneath. And then to create the hand, you want to give him a thumb. So basically make a mitten. And then with the rest of it, you want three lines. And then just shape it back to however you want the pose to be. And then, same thing on the opposite. Make sure you do the hand the other way with the other arm. And you want the hands to come together right in front of where the head is going to go. That way the head will rest on the hands.

Hi, my name is Amanda Oakleaf. I am owner, head baker, decorator of Amanda Oakleaf Cakes in Winthrop, Massachusetts where we do custom cakes of all kinds — wedding cakes, birthday cakes, sculpted cakes. Anything you can think of we can make it into a cake. And today I will be talking to you about cake decorating.
And the head you just want to pinch off another size ball, and before you start shaping it, just make sure it’s the right size. You’d rather have it too big than too small. Then just fold it around so that all the wrinkles of the fondant are underneath, rather than right in the center of the face.
So I’m just going to pick the best side for my face. So for the face, we’re going to do it like he’s sleeping so we’ll create just some eyelids, rather than drawing the whole eye. So we have a tip, imprint it only half of the circle, and it’ll be like he’s sleeping, and then we just want to give him a little tiny, the tiniest piece, into a little ball for his nose. And just a little bit of glue where it’s going to go, and then for the mouth, we’ll use a smaller sized tip, kinda like he might be snoring his mouth is open, and we’ll do that right underneath where the nose is going to go.
And then we’ll cover him with a blanket of fondant, just make sure it’s the same thickness all the way around, and you want to use your pizza cutter to wheel out the right size. So start bigger than you think. Yep, so I think that’s about the right size and we’ll give it a little bit of texture with this tool, it’s a wheel and it has a zig zag edge and it gives the impression of stitching as if it were a quilt. So we’ll go diagonal. After you get the quilting on if you want to take a round piping tip you can just imprint where the lines meet and it will create the look of pearls on your quilt.
So now we have all the pieces, they’re not glued together yet, we can glue them once they’re on the cake, so we’ll start with the body, arms and legs… So just dry fit it where you want to see it first and then we’ll glue it after we like how it looks. So we’ll start with the large piece, and you want to glue it both to the body and to the cake, so on both sides. And the head I’m going to glue where it’s gonna sit, rather than the head itself, that way I can spin it around if I need to. So rather than gluing the blanket I’m just going to glue right in the middle of the body, not too far out because you don’t want glue to show where there won’t be blanket.
You could use a little piece of fondant twisted up, or I have an edible marker with edible food color in the marker and you can give him a little curl of hair on the top. And that is a baby figurine!

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Hi, my name is Amanda Oakleaf. I am owner, head baker, decorator of Amanda Oakleaf Cakes in Winthrop, Massachusetts where we do custom cakes of all kinds — wedding cakes, birthday cakes, sculpted cakes. Anything you can think of we can make it into a cake. And today I will be talking to you about cake decorating. When decorating a cake, there are three basic kinds of frostings. We have the butter cream, royal icing, and fondant. Butter cream is your standard cupcake frosting that you would use to fill and frost a cake. It’s kind of got an off-white texture. If it is a pure white butter cream, you can be a little suspicious because the off-white color is created by the butter in the cake and the vanilla, so if was pure white, you might be suspicious. Is there butter in there? Is it real vanilla? Ours has both, so it’s easily spreadable. It holds its peaks. It holds its shape. It’s good for making roses, and decorations like that. Second we have royal icing. Royal icing is pure white. This has no fat in it. It’s a frosting that dries hard after you decorate with it. It kind of dries hard like a candy. It’s made of meringue powder, four egg whites, and powdered sugar, and a little bit of water, and you can adjust the consistency by adding more or less water to be more spreadable. This also holds its shape very well. You can do really delicate or extreme work. You can pipe out a lot of details, scroll-work onto a cake, and it will dry hard in the end, that if you bump the cake accidentally the royal icing won’t smear as butter cream will. Royal icing is also used as a glue. If you want to hold two pieces of fondant together on your cake, a little royal icing in between will dry hard in the end and will hold the pieces together. Lastly, we have fondant. Fondant is a sugar dough that can be rolled out to cover a cake. It can be molded to be figurines, flowers, bows, ribbon. Anything you want. So it’s basically like a play-doh. Ours is a homemade marshmallow-based fondant so it actually tastes pretty good. It’s just marshmallows, powdered sugar, and then you have a sugar dough. So, all three of these together make a well-decorated cake.

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Hi, my name is Amanda Oakleaf. I am owner, head baker, decorator of Amanda Oakleaf Cakes in Winthrop, Massachusetts where we do custom cakes of all kinds — wedding cakes, birthday cakes, sculpted cakes. Anything you can think of we can make it into a cake. And today I will be talking to you about cake decorating. And I have fondant and gum paste mix. Fondant to keep it pretty moist while you’re working with it. Gum paste dries hard once it has some time to dry. A little bit of cornstarch to keep it from sticking to the table. And for this we want to roll it pretty thin, that will make the flower petals more realistic. So now we have it rolled out, it’s pretty thin, that way it will look more realistic once we get it punched out. So we have 4 different sizes of this flower cutter, and that will allow us to get the 4 different layers to really make it frilly. So we’ll start with the big one. We’ll have the big one and then one of each. And then now we want to frill the edges, because right now we have this cut flat edge and it’s really not very exciting once it’s stacked up. So we want to have this tool. It’s graduated and it comes to a point on the end. And that’s the end we want to use to frill the edges. So we just want to roll it back and forth. And it will kind of flatten and ruffle the edges to make it more realistic, more like a real flower petal. So you just want to hold it in one spot. Give it a couple rolls back and forth, and it creates ruffles. And that’s what we want to do on every petal. And if you don’t have this specific tool, they come in the sets with all of the fondant tools. But if you can’t get it you can use a toothpick as well. So once you get all your petals punched out and frilled the edges, wrap up whatever is extra just because you don’t want the gum paste to dry out. It drys out very quickly. And then we have a flower shaper as a mold to hold our shape. So there’s 2 different sizes. You can kind of pick which one you like. The wider one will make a very open flower, and the smaller one will kind of condense it a little bit more. I think that’s what I want. So you want to have the biggest one on the bottom. And I also like, I frilled the edges, you could also add a couple veins just by dragging the pointed end of this tool from the center outwards. And that will even give it some creases to fold by. And then you want a little bit of your glue, which is a mixture of water and meringue powder. And just a little bit of glue on the very inside. You don’t want to much glue showing on the outer edges. And then you can kind of pinch in the middle and fold it. There’s no special rule. Kind of make it how you want it to look. And make sure they’re two stuck together. And then a little bit of glue in the next one. Next size down. So that’s our flower, and it needs a little inside. So you can pinch off a little bit of your extra color. I like to make a little ball. A little glue in the very middle. Press that in there. And then to give it a little texture I have a piping tip, and that will give it some texture on the inside. And then you can kind of ruffle the edges, and cover some of it up, and fix it how you like it. And then it will dry. Give it a half an hour/hour to dry and then you can put it on your cake.

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Hi, my name is Amanda Oakleaf. I am owner, head baker, decorator of Amanda Oakleaf Cakes in Winthrop, Massachusetts where we do custom cakes of all kinds — wedding cakes, birthday cakes, sculpted cakes. Anything you can think of we can make it into a cake. And today I will be talking to you about cake decorating. Next we’re going to airbrush the cake. We have a fondanted cake that’s white, we’re going to make a light teal color. So, we have our three airbrush colors, a little bit of white ‘cos we don’t want it to be too dark, yellow and a light blue. And this is our airbrush gun, it’s hooked up to a compressor, which we just have sitting on the floor, and this is going to spray the color onto our cake. Airbrush color mixes like watercolor if you’ve ever painted with watercolors. The colors look very dark until you spray them out onto a white surface. So, you can kind of play around with how much you want, I would start lighter than you think, because it’s easier to go darker and add more color than to take away color. So just a couple of drops of the blue, a drop of the yellow, mix it up, and I want to test it on paper to make sure I have the color that I want. And then on the airbrush gun, some of them are built differently, on ours this is the chamber where you hold the ink, the sprayer is on the end and then this is our trigger. When you press down, that’s when it starts to flow, when you pull it backwards, that’s when it starts to spray at a wider angle; so it’s a combination of pressing down and pulling back to control your spray. If you have it up front you can draw lines, if you have it spread out all the way to the back at a wide angle you can airbrush the whole cake, which is what we’re going to do. So you want to keep it at the same distance all the way around, you don’t want to get too close or too far away, otherwise your cake will be splotchy. So we’re going to start on the top, and you want to keep the cake moving so you don’t get too much color in one spot. So once you have the top covered very evenly, go ahead and switch to the side, you can start with the corner, and then move to the side. And just keep the same distance away from the cake the whole time, and keep the cake moving and spinning while you spray. Once you get around you can go ahead and touch up any spots that you feel are too light, and then I’m just going to do the base a little, OK. Then we have a darker ring here in the corner where a lot of the color settles, but we’ll go ahead at the very end and pipe on a trim, and that is how you airbrush a cake.

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Hi, my name is Amanda Oakleaf. I am owner, head baker, decorator of Amanda Oakleaf Cakes in Winthrop, Massachusetts where we do custom cakes of all kinds — wedding cakes, birthday cakes, sculpted cakes. Anything you can think of we can make it into a cake. And today I will be talking to you about cake decorating. So we have our airbrushed cake and now we’re going to add a ribbon around the base and a little bow in the front. So we have our color. We’re going to give it a little bit of a knead and we want to sprinkle a little corn starch. That’ll keep it from sticking to the table, and we’re going to roll out a long strip so start with the shape that we want. We want a long ribbon. So that should be long enough to wrap around the cake. We have this fancy tool, it’s a scissoring roller cutter and it allows you to cut a strip very easily. To make it look like fabric we have another roller that has a zigzag edge that will add stitch marks. You could also add polka dots. You could also have a texturing mat to give different looks to your ribbon. To glue it onto the side we have a mixture of water and meringue powder. We’ll start with a flat edge, and you can cradle the ribbon so it doesn’t stretch with your other arm and just apply it with your other arm as you spin it around. When you get to the end you can use your exacto tool and cut along right where it meets. There’ll be a little seam but we can cover that up with the bow. So that’s our ribbon, and then to make the bow you want to cut out a shape where it’s skinnier in the middle and wider where the bow edges will be and then a little skinnier towards the middle again. So it’s kind of like an untied bow tie. That looks how I like it. We want a little bit of glue in the middle here because that’s where the two ends are going to stick together, and then I also like to glue a little bit on the outside of these because that’s where they’re going to scrunch up into a bow. So put that in the middle, and the other one. A little bit of glue, and then you want to scrunch it up as if it was tied and you can create a couple folds to make it look like it is fabric. Give it a good pinch. So that’s the basic bow. I like to put it on a foam. That allows it to dry a little faster and keep it from drying too flat. Then we want a strip to cover the middle so on your extra, cut a little piece that’s wide enough and you want it to extend and wrap around the back as well. Flip it over, a little glue on the back. Flip it over, with your exacto tool cut off the extras. Then you want to just let it dry half an hour to an hour. That will stiffen up and we’ll be able to place it right on the side of our cake.

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Hi, my name is Amanda Oakleaf. I am owner, head baker, decorator of Amanda Oakleaf Cakes in Winthrop, Massachusetts where we do custom cakes of all kinds — wedding cakes, birthday cakes, sculpted cakes. Anything you can think of we can make it into a cake. And today I will be talking to you about cake decorating. And today I will be talking to you about cake decorating. I actually grew up baking with my mom and both of my grandmothers. We did baking and we did desserts, cookies, pies, cakes. I don’t remember ever having store a bought cake for anyones birthday. We always made it a big deal to design everybody’s cake special for their birthday. So I grew up doing it so I was very familiar with it. I didn’t feel like I had to learn it very well. And then I went to college. I went to the College of Massachusetts college of Art and Design where I majored in painting took a lot of classes in ceramics. So I got both aspects, 2D decorating and designing as well as three dimensional structure related training. And then while I was in college I had a part time job. A couple of them, one as a cake decorator making ice cream cakes, and another one as a gift basket designer and party planning. So after I graduated I kind of combined all three: growing up baking, art degree, and part time jobs into one and said, “I can do this on my own!”

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Hi, my name is Amanda Oakleaf. I am owner, head baker, decorator of Amanda Oakleaf Cakes in Winthrop, Massachusetts where we do custom cakes of all kinds — wedding cakes, birthday cakes, sculpted cakes. Anything you can think of we can make it into a cake. And today I will be talking to you about cake decorating.When picking out wedding cake designs we find that there are three options. You could do a traditional three-tiered wedding cake decorated to match your event and then you would serve that to all your guests. You could also do miniature versions maybe two-tiered or single tiered mini two servings worth of cake and those could be your center pieces, maybe one on every table. You could also do them as favors. One on every plate, and those could match your event as well, decorated for the party. You could also do another option which would be to do a dummy cake. So say you have fifty people at your wedding, 50 servings of cake, but you want it to look like a 100-200 serving cake, much taller, more elegant. You can do a dummy cake where half the cake would be Styrofoam and the other half would be actual edible cake. That way you get the height and design. The Styrofoam can be decorated just like the rest of the cake and everything matches. You could also do sheet cakes in the back. Now if you wanted just a smaller cake to be the display but you don’t want to cut it, you want to keep it looking pretty, you want to keep it on display, you could have sheet cakes in the back in the kitchen and those could be cut and served to the guests as well. So you can consider what options you like best for designing your wedding cake.

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Hi, my name is Amanda Oakleaf. I am owner, head baker, decorator of Amanda Oakleaf Cakes in Winthrop, Massachusetts where we do custom cakes of all kinds — wedding cakes, birthday cakes, sculpted cakes. Anything you can think of we can make it into a cake. And today I will be talking to you about cake decorating. So our final step now is to write the message on the cake and this is the Baby Shower cake so we’re going to write, “Welcome Baby” right here on the front. So it’s a good idea to practice with your message on a piece of piping paper before you go ahead on the cake ‚Äì make sure it comes out of your piping tip pretty smooth. I’m using a #2 piping tip which is pretty small but I don’t want to have to big of words. I want it to be able to fit in this space right here in front. So I’m going to go ahead and practice on the page and it’s the same thing as piping the trim around the edges of the cake, you want to find the balance between how much pressure you squeeze the bag with and how fast you move across the paper or across the cake. If you move to fast the frosting will break up, and if you move to slow you’ll get bunches and squiggles. So you want to find the nice in-between. You know, with practice you’ll be able to figure that out. So I want to kind of measure how much space I have. You know, know I have to get the words to fit between that amount of space and then just as you would write with a pen. You can figure out your own style and where to put the loop-de-loops and the curls, and you know practice whatever you want. You could print, do cursive, I kind of do a mixture of both. So when you’re piping on the message you want to make sure not to drag your tip on the parchment paper, it’s not like a pen. You want to keep it slightly elevated and then allow the string of frosting just to flow out. So, “Welcome” is a bigger word then “Baby” so I’m going to I’m going to off-center that a little bit over here and then “Baby” will be right next to it.

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Hi, my name is Amanda Oakleaf. I am owner, head baker, decorator of Amanda Oakleaf Cakes in Winthrop, Massachusetts where we do custom cakes of all kinds — wedding cakes, birthday cakes, sculpted cakes. Anything you can think of we can make it into a cake. And today I will be talking to you about cake decorating. When you’re designing a birthday cake, you could go a few different ways. You could design something special around the person’s hobbies, their special interests: Do they like sports? Are they into flowers? You could recreate all that into a cake. You could also do cakes that are designed around the party. So, if you’re having a special event where you have invites and party decorations, you could bring those in and we could design a cake around that. We also have done cakes that match wallpaper. We’ve done cakes that is a baby shower, and in the baby’s new room they have curtains and quilts and toys, and even curtains and wallpaper that have a certain design, and we recreated that on the cake so that everything is all tied together. So whatever is custom, we can definitely recreate it.

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Hi, my name is Amanda Oakleaf. I am owner, head baker, decorator of Amanda Oakleaf Cakes in Winthrop, Massachusetts where we do custom cakes of all kinds — wedding cakes, birthday cakes, sculpted cakes. Anything you can think of we can make it into a cake. And today I will be talking to you about cake decorating. When designing wedding cakes we find that couples go one of two ways. They could do a wedding cake, tiered, that has maybe flowers and ribbon and colors and scroll work, either to match the reception, matching the centrepieces, flowers, matching the colors used on the dresses, matching the scrollwork maybe on your dress – the bride’s dress, or even invite design, could be all tied together in the cake; everything’s cohesive and matches. You could also do a cake that’s maybe totally personal. We’ve also done cakes that the bride and groom were fans of different sports teams so we had to divide the cake design up evenly to make sure each team got equal representation on the cake, and then we even had figurines of the bride and groom in the appropriate jerseys on the top of the cake. And that was totally separate from their reception – their colors, their flowers didn’t matter, they wanted to incorporate that aspect of their relationship into the cake. So you can think about both options when designing your wedding cake.

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Hi, my name is Amanda Oakleaf. I am owner, head baker, decorator of Amanda Oakleaf Cakes in Winthrop, Massachusetts where we do custom cakes of all kinds — wedding cakes, birthday cakes, sculpted cakes. Anything you can think of we can make it into a cake. And today I will be talking to you about cake decorating.

So, when baking a cake, it’s good to know what basic ingredients you need. If you have a recipe, the main ingredients should be flour, sugar, eggs, milk, and then, of course, the butter or the oil. The eggs in the cake provide the structure. They’re emulsifiers in the recipe. They bond the liquid ingredients with the dry ingredients; and form the structure of the strength of the cake. Also, in that group are the flours. The flour also provide strength. Usually, cake with cake flour is a more delicate cake, more fluffy; whereas, a cake with all purpose flour will have a cake texture that’s more course, more tight. And then milk in the ingredients will moisten up the cake and kind of loosen the batter, get it flowing. And the fat is where moisture comes in, whether you have oil or butter. If you have butter your recipe probably calls for the creaming method; where you cream the butter and the sugar together. And you would want to do that for at least five minutes, so that the butter and sugar create air pockets inside. The longer they whip the more air pockets you’ll have and the fluffier cake in the end. So, spend the time to whip the sugar and butter together; that way your end result will be better. And then, from there, you would add the eggs. Adding the eggs one at a time, will allow the eggs to be fully incorporated and keep the batter from getting too wet too quickly. And then from there you would alternate the flour and the milk. And you don’t want to be add those too quickly either. You want everything to be incorporated slowly. That way the batter is evenly incorporated. So, a little bit of flour, a little bit of milk; alternate it until everything’s mixed in. And then, save the flour for the last. Once everything’s mixed together, then you want to pour it in the pans and bake it up. When you bake it, you want to make sure to keep it in the middle of the oven. That way it’s not too close to the heat on the bottom. And then bake it up until; when you press the center, if you leave a finger mark and it sinks, the batter’s still liquid inside. So, make sure to bake it a little longer. If you could insert a toothpick into the middle and the batter sticks to the toothpick, it’s not done either. So, those are two ways to check it. If you press it and it kind of bounces back, the cake then is done. Take it out of the oven. And that’s the basics of baking.

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Hi, my name is Amanda Oakleaf. I am owner, head baker, decorator of Amanda Oakleaf Cakes in Winthrop, Massachusetts where we do custom cakes of all kinds — wedding cakes, birthday cakes, sculpted cakes. Anything you can think of we can make it into a cake. And today I will be talking to you about cake decorating. There is two types of cake recipes. You could have one where it uses butter as the fat. You could also have one that uses oil. There would be two different methods for baking them. If you use butter it would be creamed with the butter and the sugar to create the air pockets inside and that would help strengthen the cake and create the support and the air inside necessary to rise. If you use oil you would probably mix it all in one bowl because oil when you beat it doesn’t hold air pockets inside of it. With one exception if you beat the oil with the eggs you could whip some air but not as much as butter and sugar. So if you’re just using oil you would just go ahead and pour it in with the liquids of the cake but then you would need to rely on leaveners such as baking powder and baking soda more of those to help the oil cake rise as it will be more dense. As far as flavor, butter provides more flavor in a cake but oil cakes we usually do with a carrot cake, maybe some fruit cakes. The flavor of the cinnamon and the nutmeg and the carrots in the carrot cake will kind of overpower and grant enough flavor where the oil would not. As far as structure the butter cakes have a more fine crumb and will fall apart when you cut it in smaller pieces. If you have an oil cake it will hold together a little bit better and will cut very cleanly. So those are the three main differences between oil and butter cakes.

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Hi, my name is Amanda Oakleaf. I am owner, head baker, decorator of Amanda Oakleaf Cakes in Winthrop, Massachusetts where we do custom cakes of all kinds — wedding cakes, birthday cakes, sculpted cakes. Anything you can think of we can make it into a cake. And today I will be talking to you about cake decorating. So, when decorating a cake, there’s two sets of tools. One for butter cream and one for fondant. Butter cream tools are used to shape the butter cream and push it around, move it around, squeeze it out. This is an offset spreader. That’ll help you spread around the butter cream in small detail, scoop up roses and put them on a cake. This is a piping bag. If you’re filling it, you want to turn it inside out and that way, you can hold it with one hand, use the other hand to scoop the frosting, put it inside. If you want to use the tips, you can easily change them out if you put in a coupler first. That’s a plastic, threaded piece and that goes in the inside and your tip fits right over that, then your screw holds it in place. Then you can go ahead, fill it up with whatever color, fold it inside out, fill it with whatever color and you’re ready to go. We also have a tool, it’s called the comb, and when you butter cream a cake, if you want to add some texture to the sides, some ridges, this one comes with three different edges and you can add some texture to your cake that way. If you’re working with fondant, if you cover a cake, you can use a fondant smoother that uses pressure on to the cake. That way, you don’t get the finger marks on the side. This is a nice, smooth edge and a nice, perpendicular to the bottom of the cake, the base of the cake. If you’re making decorations, rolling out fondant for sugar flowers and small details, you can use the small roller and that would get a really thin sheet of fondant for you. To cut the edges, you can cut ribbon, you can cut right around the base of the cake after you fondant it. There’s also a double wheel, one to cut a straight edge one to cut a roughly edge. And then we have a whole set of tools, this is one, for example, for fondant sculpting and molding. You can add indents, lines. This one has a thread of texture. You can add maybe hair on a figurine or just some texture on a leaf or something. So, when you’re working with cake, just keep the tools separate, butter cream and fondant.

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Hi, my name is Amanda Oakleaf. I am owner, head baker, decorator of Amanda Oakleaf Cakes in Winthrop, Massachusetts where we do custom cakes of all kinds — wedding cakes, birthday cakes, sculpted cakes. We’ve done dogs, cars, purses; anything you can think of we can make it into a cake. And today I will be talking to you about cake decorating.

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Hi, my name is Amanda Oakleaf. I am owner, head baker, decorator of Amanda Oakleaf Cakes in Winthrop, Massachusetts where we do custom cakes of all kinds — wedding cakes, birthday cakes, sculpted cakes. Anything you can think of we can make it into a cake. And today I will be talking to you about cake decorating. So next we’re going to cover a cake in fondant. We have a cake already crumb coated. We use the same technique for butter creaming the cake. Just a little bit thinner, and it’s okay if some of the cake shows through as long as it’s nice and square and level we’re all set. So that’s our cake. We’ve had it in the fridge for a few hours. That helps it to stiffen up a little bit. The fondant we have already softened. If you have it sitting overnight then you might need to throw it in the microwave for a minute or two to really soften up and knead it. So you need a little bit of corn starch. You could use powdered sugar as well but we find that corn starch is more silky and it’s easier to work with. With some on your table cover the bottom of it and you want to press it into a circle to start with because you want a big circle to cover the cake. So you want to use the rolling pin to roll it out into a circle. You don’t want to get it too thin. Maybe between a quarter and an eighth inch thickness. Make sure its not stuck to the table. If there’s any air bubbles from kneading it you can go ahead and take your knife and just make a little slit and then push the air out. This one looks pretty smooth. Then you want to lift it up and center it right over the cake. You want to unfold the ruffles a little bit. Keep it flat. Then you want to start at the top with your fondant smoother, and you want to press out any air bubbles from the top of the cake. Press them out to the side. Then work your way around the side, pressing the air down and out. Once it’s stuck to the side use your fondant smoother so you don’t have finger marks, and then keep it straight up and down and that will help adhere the fondant to the side of the cake. We’re also going to cover the base, the cardboard base. I like to score, you can feel where the cardboard is underneath, just go with your finger where it is and then you can take a pizza cutter and cut right along the edge. And there you have it. You want to knead back the rest of your fondant back into a ball, wrap it in plastic wrap until you’re ready to make decorations.

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Hi, my name is Amanda Oakleaf. I am owner, head baker, decorator of Amanda Oakleaf Cakes in Winthrop, Massachusetts where we do custom cakes of all kinds — wedding cakes, birthday cakes, sculpted cakes. Anything you can think of we can make it into a cake. And today I will be talking to you about cake decorating. And now we’re going to make an Italian meringue buttercream, which is a cooked sugar folded into whipped meringue with egg whites, and butter gets whipped in in the end. So, we’re gonna start. we have half a cup of water in our saucepan and we’re gonna add one and a fourth cup of granulated sugar. and we wanna heat it up until it comes to a boil. And we wanna watch it with a candy thermometer to make sure it comes up to 248-250 degrees. So we just wanna give it a stir, make sure it dissolves, and then keep an eye on it with the candy thermometer. In the mean time we wanna add one cup of egg whites and then with the whisk attachment on your mixer, we wanna keep it on high speed until they get frothy. And then we’re gonna add one teaspoon of cream of tartar. So we have the sugar syrup boiling and that’s gonna reach 250 and we got the egg whites whipping. They’re gonna be white and fluffy, they’re gonna double in volume. Once they get to soft peaks stage, we’re gonna add one third a cup of granulated sugar. And we just need to wait a few minutes for everything to come to temperature. And now our egg whites are at soft peak stage so we’re gonna add our cup, our 1/3 cup of granulated sugar. Now our sugar is at 250 degrees so it’s okay to go ahead and add it to our meringue. Turn down the mixer to a low speed, you don’t wanna get any of the sugar syrup on the beater blade or on the side of the bowl. Those are cold, so if the sugar sticks to that it’s gonna harden and you’ll have little chunks of candy inside. So you just wanna slowly pour it right on the edge, without getting any sugar on the side of the bowl. Scrape it down, make sure you get all of it in there. And then we’re gonna turn the mixer back up to high speed, whip it, until the meringue is cooled down. We don’t wanna add the butter too soon. If you added the butter now, it would melt because the sugar has been so hot. So maybe five minutes or so, it’ll cool down then we’ll add the butter. So now that our bowl has cooled down to room temperature, we wanna add our room temperature butter, a couple tablespoons at a time. Adding a couple tablespoons at a time ensures that everything gets mixed in smoothly and you don’t have any chunks of butter in the end. Give it a couple more minutes, its gonna look a little curdled in the beginning, but give it a couple minutes in the mixer on medium-high speed and everything will get really smooth for you. At this stage the buttercream has come together really smoothly and it’s making that flop-flop sound that buttercream’s supposed to make. We’re gonna add one tablespoon of vanilla. Mix it in, just until it incorporated and that should be Italian meringue. And you’re ready to frost a cake.

Transcript

Hi, my name is Amanda Oakleaf. I am owner, head baker, decorator of Amanda Oakleaf Cakes in Winthrop, Massachusetts where we do custom cakes of all kinds — wedding cakes, birthday cakes, sculpted cakes. Anything you can think of we can make it into a cake. And today I will be talking to you about cake decorating. So now we’re going to go through the steps of butter creaming a cake. We bake our cakes in two. One is the ticker version twice as high as the other. That way when you cut this one in half, and this one, we’re just going to level it. We’ll have three layers of cake and two layers of filling inside. This tool that I have here is a cake leveler. It’s just a serrated wire and we adjust the notches on the side to the cake we want. We just want to take off this dome on the top of the cake. That way your cake stacks up nice and level. We’re going to cut our most thick one in half. Now we have three layers of cake. So you want to start with that. A little bit of butter cream on the cardboard round helps the cake to stick. First layer. Make sure it’s centered right in the middle of the cardboard. A big scoop of frosting in the middle. You want to use a miss america wave technique and that will spread the frosting evenly and spin the turn table with your opposite hand as you go. And don’t worry if some hangs off the edge, that’s perfectly fine. We’re going to use that later to frost the sides of the cake. Now to level it off you want to spin the turntable with one hand and then use the spatula spreader to level it. So make sure you keep this level and keep one hand still. Spin the turntable, and that will scrape off all the extras and level off the cake. Again, leave this extra frosting on the outside. That will help us in the end. Next cake layer, and then repeat the same process for the next layer. The last layer, if we flip it over we’ll have a nice sealed edge and that will keep a lot of crumbs out of our final coat. So an even bigger scoop on the top of the cake. We’re going to do the outside. You want all that frosting to fall over the edge. Then you want to level off the top same as the other two layers. You want to do that same miss america wave that we were doing here on the side so work now perpendicular to the table and you can add frosting as you go. It’s not going to be enough, what we have here. It’s better to start with more frosting on the cake than you think. We can always scrape it off, however if we scrape too far you’re going to have crumbs mixed in and it won’t be as pretty. So we want to use our dough cutter. You can do this in a spinning motion keeping your right hand still, and you want to keep it straight up and down keeping it perpendicular to so that levels it. Then add a little decoration. You can use a comb piece, you could use a fork, and you want to do this all in one motion. You don’t want to stop and go. So you can wrap one hand all the way around, double over, and you should be able to get that pattern all in one turn around. You can see the peaks that we have up here. You want to make sure your spatula’s all cleaned off. Then you want to pull these in and level off, and that’s our cake and you’re ready to decorate.

Transcript

Hi, my name is Amanda Oakleaf. I am owner, head baker, decorator of Amanda Oakleaf Cakes in Winthrop, Massachusetts where we do custom cakes of all kinds — wedding cakes, birthday cakes, sculpted cakes. Anything you can think of we can make it into a cake. And today I will be talking to you about cake decorating. Marshmallow fondant we make in the store is thirty two ounces of marshmallows, powdered sugar fifteen cups sifted, and we also have our special ingredient gum tragacanth which is a plant based gum that when added to the fondant it gives it more elasticity and more bend. So we want to start by adding half of the sugar, seven and a half cups. And you don’t have to be terribly exact with the measuring of the powdered sugar. You may need more sugar on more humid days and maybe some more water on drier days. You also want to sift in three quarters, you don’t need to have the gum tragacanth powder. The fondant will work perfectly fine. We just find that it gives us more elasticity when making decorations. Half your sugar, and then you want to add your melted marshmallows. So you want three bags, we use mini marshmallows. We find that they melt a little bit better than the big ones. Half a cup of water, you can microwave them and they’ll go into our big bowl. So once you have your marshmallows melted give them a good stir. Make sure there’s no remaining lumps. They go over your sugar. We’re using our twenty quart mixer and bowl with the hook attachment. You can make this at home and just go ahead and put some vegetable shortening all over your table, all over your hands, and you can knead it in right on the table on the counter top. Then we have another seven and a half cups of powdered sugar and we want to sift that again. So you may need to add a little bit more powdered sugar if the fondant is a little bit sticky. I would add a cup at a time. You want it to be a pliable dough to work with and not too sticky. You should be able to grab a piece of it and play with it without it sticking to your hands too much so I think we have a good batch. I have a little sugar on the table just to keep it from sticking but you just want to knead it into one nice big ball of dough and it should hold together really nice like this. You want to give your ball of fondant a good coat of vegetable shortening and wrap it in plastic a couple times. Make sure it stays moist. You want to plan to make your fondant a day ahead of time or at least the night before. It needs at least eight or ten hours to set up and be the right texture.

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Hi, my name is Amanda Oakleaf. I am owner, head baker, decorator of Amanda Oakleaf Cakes in Winthrop, Massachusetts where we do custom cakes of all kinds — wedding cakes, birthday cakes, sculpted cakes. Anything you can think of we can make it into a cake. And today I will be talking to you about cake decorating. So now we’re going to make royal icing. Royal icing consists of powdered sugar, egg whites, we’re going to use meringue powder which is the dried version of egg whites, and some warm water. This is mainly a decorative icing and used to make small details and piping on some cakes. So we got to have four cups of powdered sugar and you want to make sure it’s level when you scoop it and put it into our sifter and we want to make sure everything’s sifted. That way we don’t have any clumps of sugar in our end result. We also want to sift in the meringue powder and we need three tablespoons. Sift it right into the powdered sugar into the mixing bowl that you will use to mix it. Make sure you get every little bit in there. That goes into the mixer and this time you want to use the flat blade beater attachment. Turn it on low. You don’t want the sugar to fly everywhere, and slowly add in the warm water. We have six tablespoons of warm water. Turn it up a little until everything is moistened. Once we have everything moistened as you see, turn up the speed medium high until everything whips up nice and fluffy it should maybe double up in volume. We’re just going to check the texture here. Royal icing can be finicky. It depends on the weather. If it’s dry it may need some more water, if it’s too humid it may need a little less water. In my case we might have had too much water. We’re going to add a little bit more sugar. Half a cup at a time. It’s still pretty flat so we’re going to add a little bit of sugar at a time until it comes to the right consistency we’re looking for. The consistency we’re looking for are stiff peaks. If you pick up a little bit of frosting and the peaks fall over, this is soft peak so we want to add a little bit more sugar so that when we have the frosting it should stand up straight. So we’re going to add another half a cup. And now I think we got it. We got a stiff icing that’ll hold up well and pipe really nice on decorated cakes.

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Hi, my name is Amanda Oakleaf. I am owner, head baker, decorator of Amanda Oakleaf Cakes in Winthrop, Massachusetts where we do custom cakes of all kinds — wedding cakes, birthday cakes, sculpted cakes. Anything you can think of we can make it into a cake. And today I will be talking to you about cake decorating. So now our cake is butter creamed and we’re ready to start decorating. We want to fill our piping bags with butter cream, and we’ll pipe on both trim and a couple roses on the top. So, this is our piping bag. You want to turn half of it inside out, it’ll be easier to fill. So, hold it with one hand. We have couplers that go inside, and that allows us to change the tips. The tip screw holds it on, and then you’re ready to fill. You want to use this lavender color, and you want to hold it inside out and pack it in tight. You don’t want too many air bubbles sneaking in, otherwise you’ll get a big splat on your cake when you got to pipe it out. And then shake it down. And then you want to twist right where the frosting ends. Twist it up. So when you squeeze the frosting goes down rather than out the opposite end. So, were gonna do a reverse shell pattern on the cake with the piping. You can use any round tip that kinda has a star on the top. You can practice before you do on the cake on some parchment paper. And you just want to squeeze evenly. It’s like a backwards curly-cue every other time. The main trick is to get the hang of how much pressure to squeeze the bag with and how fast to move. If you move too fast, you’ll get breaks like I did here. If you move too slowly, you’ll get a really big decoration. So, when you’re doing it on the cake it’s in a circular pattern, and you just want to turn the turn table as you go. So we’ll start here. Keep it on the edge. And you don’t want to move your right hand too much – you want to keep that in the same position and use your left hand to turn the turn table. We’re going to do the same pattern on the bottom. And you just hold it at a little bit different angle. There we go. We’re also going to do a couple butter cream roses. So, for butter cream roses you want the tip number 104. It’s skinnier at the top and gets wider towards the bottom. So, we want to use a combination of that and a flower nail. And you want to start with a lump of frosting on the base and you want to spin the nail with your left hand. And that’s the base. And then you want to start with your tip clean every tie. And you want to have the fat end, the widest end, on the bottom and the skinny end on the top. And squeeze out a little as you go. You’ll get a spiral, in the middle, that’s the middle of the rose. And then, once you have the middle you want to add the pedals, keeping the skinny end on the top and kind of like a rainbow pattern – an up and down motion every time. And you want to overlap the pedals. So, you should be able to get three pedals around the first time and then over lap them. And then maybe four of five of them around the next time. And you want to cover all the sides. And you want to change the angle as you go. So, around the bottom of the rose your piping bag angles outward that way the rose opens up a little bit. And there you have it. And then you want to use an offset mini spatula. And then give the rose a spin that will lift it off the nail. And drop it onto the cake. That’s a butter cream rose.